Elegant and emblematic as the beasts inhabiting Burke's Animal Purpose, these poems ask impossible questions of love, death, and the all too human constructs meant to manage both. What a painfully beautiful debut this is.
[Burke] has an exceptional ability to translate a common animal into a vision or metaphor with restraint via dignified stanzas that credit the materialized world of creatures. * Washington Independent Review of Books *
Michelle Burke's lovely Animal Purpose delights when the human animal and the other animals align their often contrary spirits. Burke writes lyrically and searchingly about the purposes of us all-human and nonhuman animal-in this fine, fascinating, and constantly surprising book.
Burke's tender and brave poems refuse to turn away from the cruelties of the world, both the kind we endure and the kind we unwittingly inflict-and yet, even as they bear witness, they insist on joy. And tilt towards hope. And pry beauty from unlikely places.
Burke's stunning first collection transforms the echoes of the pastoral tradition into complex contemporary terrain in a voice that is both subtle and urgent. Underlying these meditations is a wariness of easy philosophies about the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. There is abundance here, a specificity in her imagery and cadences that makes this book an engaging and emotionally potent exploration of environment and self.
Animal Purpose is a collection of deep optimism and subtle craft from a poet intimate with both the rural Midwest and the megalopolis of New York. She has seen, it appears, the best and worst of both these worlds, and while her intellect has chosen the latter, these poems would seem to hint her heart is still with the former. The soil of her imagination is too rich with wild things to leave them behind, and she shows us our own place among them. * Fourth & Sycamore *
Michelle Y. Burke has a splendid imagination, yet her poems are grounded in the quotidian. She knows how to pick, from the world, the just-right opposite of quotidian. Deeply satisfying turns happen throughout Burke's poems-they are never forced, and surprise never diminishes what is inevitable and true.
